What is going on with Square Enix and the 14 team?

[Liam_Harper]

As I've mentioned before, the devs are terrible at resource management. They've poured resources into niche content or content that lasts 10 minutes, neglect to pour resources into areas that need it and tend to stretch themselves far too thin. They take on projects that are unsustainable in the long run and stubbornly stick to them, housing Wards instead of instanced housing, 2+ classes per expansion, 2 races in a single expansion for example.

They have plenty of staff on the credits, yet somehow certain areas of the game are in dire need of extra staff. The STF for tackling bots, class designers, gear designers, qualified QA testers and so on. We have unqualified staff doing these jobs on their spare time and Yoshida poking his nose into literally everything and trying to do a million things at once that he's not qualified for.

The result is the devs have been working flat out with overtime the last few years and get less and less done while continually having to trim things. They really need to step back, assign some more staff to share the load and revaluate where to place their priorities. It would be healthier for them and the game.

[SturmChurro]

As I've mentioned before, the devs are terrible at resource management. They've poured resources into niche content or content that lasts 10 minutes, neglect to pour resources into areas that need it and tend to stretch themselves far too thin. (...) 2 races in a single expansion for example.

Pretty much what I'd guess as well. They allocated resources to the initial release state of viera/hrothgar - the vastly more limited state of viera/hrothgar - which wouldn't have had an effect on their patch release schedule. No hairs, no headgear, etc.. Then they started fitting some headgear to viera/hrothgar, then Covid hit. I'm not going to pretend Covid didn't have an impact, it did, but issues like these were prevalent prior to Covid. They then release male viera. I do believe Yoshida when he has said how much it costs to maintain these races.

However, In the end, it was their decision to include them, and this game has become extremely successful. The players of viera/hrothgar deserve better.